Mark Cousins' The History of film: An Odyssey

Already jealous of the innocent channel surfer who stumbles upon "Daisies" this fall.

i am jealous. think they showed about a dozen related films when it aired over here. (actually, i still have a couple to watch)

i love his voice. i find it soothing.

I'm about halfway through the series. Cousins is annoying but I can't say I haven't learned anything. His clip choices have been very good, too.

So many of these are worth a re-watch, so it's going to be tough keeping space on the DVR.

The TCM programming starts tonight. Got my DVR set up with two days to spare, can't wait to watch and record a bunch of this.

can you please rule on how annoying he is wmc, you are a trustworthy voice on this imo

nvr heard that thing to kick off part 15 abt in the past having a "wild man" on set to propose crazy ideas ?

is cool he picked things like oasis, larezcu & battle of heaven, i can dig his 00s nu-realism thesis

--the segment on Sokurov

^this was good too, kinda a blind spot to me

Did anyone see a story of children & film? I thought that was pretty cool

i like this

Been watching this on Netflix. Def. making me want to check out a bunch of things I've never seen before. Especially the 1920s-1930s Japanese stuff (I've seen all the famous Kurosawas and Hausu and Battle Royale and uh . . . . that's it), some of the less famous noir films and some silents.

i missed this completely when it came out, but it's up on netflix now so i've been blazing my way through it. i only read the first 10-20 posts itt because i didn't want to accidentally read something that would ruin a cool moment later in the series, but of those first 10-20 posts:

- i also rolled my eyes at the "film is about ideas, not money" theme, but then again, maybe that's because the vast majority of film that i know about (not much, i am perpetually a newcomer to everything) was made in the mid-to-late capitalist, post-jaws/star wars USA era. maybe $$ wasn't quite the driver in other centers of filmmaking, at various points? at any rate if cousins continues make his argument by showing awesome clips that demonstrate brilliant ideas and then following up with interviews with people who are inspired by that creativity, that's fine with me. i'm not sure that he'll win in a court of law but it's entertaining as hell.

- i like his voice.

for real: i only watched the first 10-20 minutes itf because i didn't want to accidentally see something that would ruin a cool moment later in the history of cinema

lol

life is so much better when it's a complete surprise

I love his dedication to showing the very final scene of every significant film ever

can't imagine i am not already somewhere upthread getting hysterical about this, but: i think when he's Teaching You Cross-Cutting it's okay, & that there are limits to the degree one which would subsequently benefit from watching like ... free cinema with fresh eyes. it's when he's just off-handedly mentioning that there's a really killer dreyer movie called ordet & not even saying so much about it but still choosing to show you the one revelatory moment that works as the film's crux. it goes SO HARD into this, & just bites chunks out of moment of innocence, vive l'amour, everything. i really like mark cousins, his sight & sound column is beautiful, he's such a wonderful advocate, but it is just so decadent in like ... powerpoint slideshowing through the LUKE I AM YOUR FATHER moments of cinema.

lol xp

ugh, limits to the degree to which one would-, btw

I've seen probably 15-20 more of the films he talks about since watching the series, including Ordet and it didn't spoil my enjoyment of them.

I suppose the ending of the Dreyer is amazing and great, its power wasn't diminished for me. Maybe because he doesn't really talk about the film in that much detail and impose a view on it.

i just kinda ... yeah it is not okay i think. i am glad you got to see it without feeling shortchanged!, but it feels hard to argue that some of the platonic effect of the denouement is contingent on us having a general expectation of what can/can't happen. even just tonally, like the film is so controlled & sober & is so self-contained; that shouldn't be overshadowed i don't think. i'm being prescriptive & narrow-minded here but it just seems like such a dick move.

probably should have written isn't contingent. sorry i am such a mess in this thread.

Its probably just me. I can read about a film or a book beforehand and then watch knowing its ending w/out it mattering too much (unless I suppose its something like The Usual Suspects but that's just fkn dumb).

Usually because I will put another spin on the thing I watched..(Although wrt Ordet I haven't just really spent enough time thinking about it; I was numbed by that.)

Also I didn't feel that those scenes (some of which were endings, other which were not) felt like powerpoint at any point. The content was very rich for a start, and usually enriched, as you do feel these films were often conversing with one another.

The ending to Ordet has been spoiled, like, a million times. It's all everyone talks about. You say an ending was like Ordet, and everyone knows what you mean.

i really like thinking about the jesus-y, kind of john-cale-guy-in-straw-dogs guy in ordet. just roaming around on the moors.

Maybe if you hang around film buffs but I actually watched 2-3 Dreyer films before Ordet and had no idea of its ending until Cousins showed it (and I probably watched 70% of the films he talked about) (but that's the effect of not reading anywhere near enough film crit).

i guess cinema is an artform of MOMENTS and memorable images, so 'old' films like Ordet are ultimately reduced to their 'iconic' scene or sequence - chess on the beach with death, the oddessa steps - and not to feature that scene in a 'history of cinema', however wayward, wld invite criticism carping. every 'clip' ultimately travesties the whole work.

this is how the film is sold in the UK

http://shop.bfi.org.uk/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/360x360/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/5/0/5035673006658_2.jpg

***SPOILER ALERT**
The ending of Ordet is like the middle of La Jetée

I read this thing recently, on Stray Dogs I think, saying that a great thing about art-film is that they can't be spoiled, since they are experential. Does that make sense, or am I using a wrong word? Anyways: Artfilm can't be spoiled. The ending of A Man Escaped is immensely powerful, even though the title kinda spoils what happens.

Even an experiential film can surprise, even if that surprise isn't rooted in the machinations of the plot. It doesn't necessarily make a film worse to know what's coming, but the experience is different.

i hadn't totally intended to initiate this discussion, cause i know it's its own little thing, but just, when we talk of la jetee, or ordet, i think for me it's most useful for me to think of those films in which i hadn't had an awareness of whatever was coming (as is the case with the two mentioned), & to remember the effect each had on me - they were both really monumental, kind of breathtaking moments - rather than to assess whether or not i still enjoyed something that i watched with an anticipation or foreshadowing. i don't necessarily think things are spoiled by spoilers, but i think there's a kind of temporal, participatory event that one is lucky to feel, in a bunch of panahi films or in la jetee or w/e, it's something that exists kind of separate *to* the art-film or whatever & is more just a fact of existing as a human, & that the denial is just unfortunate.

i mean when i think of the moment in the sixth sense when i found out bru

one of the few advantages to having an awful memory is that Spoiler Alerts have no significance because i'll just forget anyway

I saw Cousins' latest Life May Be that he made with Iranian director Mania Akbari. They take turns making short segments, and hers is so much better than his, but to begin with he speaks about her films, and he is such a great critic, he really makes it interesting. Wrote about it a bit more.

i want to see his other films but dont know how to. i saw the children in film one, which was interesting, but just a bit too typical in its essay film structure. i felt like i was just listening to someone narrate their actual essay on the subject. but he did get me to watch the boot for which i am forever grateful - one of the best films ive ever seen in fact. will always love mark cousins for that, even if his S&S column and tweets often are a bit too dreamy.

i thought the children in film one was really weak sauce as an "essay," but it had one great value and that was to recommend some movies i hadn't seen

I stayed up until the middle of the night to watch a lot of this and associated films on tcm. Acknowledge lots of the criticisms, and thought it got weaker towards the end (quite possibly because I know the material better, but maybe not), but it was v entertaining.

def got weaker at the end, if only because he seemed to think inception was a good film :P

nick james did a funny little parody of mark cousins' column in sight and sound a few months back which i thought was amusing and also surprising - who does a riff on one of their own writers?!

where was that?

mark cousins is easy to mock, it's true. sometimes i want to slap him myself, especially when he starts flash mobs with tilda swinton.

i think it was just in the opening editorial a few months back. he wrote something like 'there i was at ____ festival, thinking of time, godard and moroni'

So many great films recommended in the Childhood doc. Saw Willow and Wind recently - easily the most harrowing film I've ever seen. Based on the reading list I'm keen to see What is this film called love?

the accompanying ebook is cheap on amazon uk at the moment

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Story-Film-%C2%A0Mark-Cousins-ebook/dp/B00OZRQUK8/

Can't imagine it as a book but I'd love a catalogue of stills from a selection of the films in the series.

new book.

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/investigation-looking-canongate-341346

Since there was some chat on the Kermode thread: might give this another go.

First episode was one of the most frustrating things I've ever seen because it had a wealth of interesting films to discover but framed them in the dumbest way: Hollywood as a "bauble" and everything else as a reaction to it, like Japanese or French or German filmic traditions only exist as a commentary on Hollywood, embarassing stuff. And filmmakers who are clearly, gloriously in the bauble camp - Lubitsch! - still portrayed as part of some nebulous #resistance.

I saw his thing on female directors at the LFF tho and that had a similar amount of amazing discoveries but without a ridiculous thesis. Hope it gets distributed more widely somehow, would be a great thing to put on demand rn.

The bauble thing is the most obviously risible thing, not just cause of rongness but also just the continued cutting to a literal bauble (at one point doesn’t he film it falling to the floor and breaking in slo mo? lol)

(at one point doesn’t he film it falling to the floor and breaking in slo mo? lol)

That reminds me: every moment of non-film footage in this looked so ugly!

One of Mark Cousin’s most criminal juxtapositions in ‘Women Make Film’: moving from a colonial torture scene in Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga to a sailing competition in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia via the notion of the eye-line...

— Another Gaze: A Feminist Film Journal (@anothergaze) May 26, 2020

not instantly convinced Cousins is oblivious to the implications of that w/o having seen it tbh (I saw bits of Women Make Films at the LFF but this wasn't in it)

tho another annoying thing in History Of Film was him going "Griffith might actually be overrated by now" and then still wasting way too much time on the fucker

what? if anyone can be skipped over due to being done to death already it's surely Griffith,